Deakin Speaking

It has been just over a year since Myanmar went to its historic elections, replacing its military-based government with one elected by the people. Yet in that time little has changed in Myanmar and, for the country’s ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority, the situation has become worse. In what a UN spokesman claims is ethnic cleansing, […]

As has been reported recently in the press, a conference of ‘white nationalists’ that met in the wake of the recent presidential election witnessed some members using the Hitler salute and one of the speakers openly using Nazi rhetoric. Video excerpts are available via The Atlantic, and certain of the expressions used (such as the German term Lügenpresse) […]

Donald Trump becoming President-elect of the United States of America came as he rode the back of a protest vote. It was a protest vote the likes of which has not been seen for the best part of a century, but which appears to be finding an increasingly loud voice, in many places. This vote […]

Anyone who is involved in academic work realizes that the language of ‘impact’ and ‘outcomes’ has come to dominate the notion of ‘excellence in research’. This is, of course, why there have been previous attempts in Australia to rank excellence (such as the 2010 ERA Journal Rankings, A*-C) and why there remain notions of measuring […]

Voting for the US presidential elections begins at 10 pm tonight (AEDT), so get a bowl of popcorn, pull up your deck chair and settle in for this final act of memorably tasteless political drama. It will be an over-nighter, but all you political junkies won’t be able to sleep anyway so you may as […]

Next Wednesday, Australian time, we will be living in the post-truth age. We will know if anti-elitist populism has triumphed over sometimes self-serving knowledge and expertise. Alternatively, we will know the extent of the damage to the surviving rationality of objective self-interest within the framework of a fractured social contract. Either way, rational debate about […]

If one was to take recent mainstream media reports at face value, one might be excused for thinking that the US presidential race is now neck and neck or that Donald Trump is now leading Hillary Clinton. It is true that Trump squeaked ahead of Clinton in one poll and that, by contrast, some media […]

As the US presidential election enters the ‘death zone’, where there remains little scope for altering voter intentions, the resurfacing of Hillary Clinton’s email saga is generating a lot of noise. It may, however, be generating less movement. The tenuous link between Hillary Clinton, a sense of wrong-doing and the emails in question has been […]

Just when we thought it was safe to think that Hillary Clinton would comfortably win the US presidential election and that, for better or worse, the US and hence the world would continue with business as usual, reality has come back to bite us on the assumption. Clinton is still likely to win but, reflecting […]

Just two weeks out from the US elections, some more populist observers still seem to believe that Donald Trump can do a ‘Brexit’ – that is, produce a surprise result – and win the presidency. It is possible that there will be a surprise in the presidential race but, given that the US votes by […]